


The Art Of Change, And Liking It, Too

by antspaul



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teachers, Artist Gerard Way, Frank/Jamia referenced, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Miscarriage (referenced), References to Depression, Teacher Gerard Way, hi to everyone who followed me for radically different fandoms!!! this is who i am now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28424388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antspaul/pseuds/antspaul
Summary: Life isn't glamorous when you're near forty, work at your local high school and hate it, and are only one disastrous year removed from your divorce. Maybe it's not all bad, but Frank, secretary to the school secretary, struggles to see the silver lining.Art teacher Gerard sees things a little differently.//AKA the one where they both work in a high school and are soft wholesome middle-aged men with dad bods.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Comments: 10
Kudos: 68





	The Art Of Change, And Liking It, Too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [expolsion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/expolsion/gifts).



> this is a belated christmas gift to my wonderful friend ciara (@dilf-frank on tumblr, go follow her pls she is incredibly funny and is always correct) who requested some teacher shenanigans where the boys had common sense and were not complete creeps. 
> 
> i hope you like it ciara!!! merry christmas!

Maybe a scattered twenty or thirty people sit in the bar at any one moment during their set. Not so bad for a Sunday night, and really, Frank made his peace long ago with the fact that his music career had reached its pinnacle with him playing in dingy bars at one-third capacity for nothing more than half-price drinks at the bar. Financial success is a shitty goal for a musician to shoot for, anyway.

After his band finishes their last song, Frank thanks his audience, who repay him with a hearty applause more than commensurate to their enthusiasm during the actual music. Maybe their sudden appreciation stems from relief to see them leave the stage, or maybe from some sort of obligation to thank live musicians for existing regardless of respect for their performance. Fewer bars let local bands commandeer their space now than when Frank was coming of age in the scene, after all. Either way, Frank heads straight to the bar after helping his bandmates strike their equipment, leaving it to Evan to pack up the van.

Frank nods at the bartender as he hops up onto the stool. “Hey, Ray.”

“Hey, Frank,” Ray says. “Whatcha in the mood for tonight? Do I need to get the nice stuff from the back?”

Frank laughs. “Fuck no. You don’t want to know what my salary looks like. Just a Yuengling if you got it.”

“Sure,” Ray says, pulling the bottle from the ice box and popping the cap off before sliding the beer across the counter into Frank’s waiting hands. “Was that new stuff you were playing just now?”

Frank says, “Kinda,” and explains that the new material was really just old material from last year, before the divorce, upcycled with a new bassline and melody from Evan. Ray nods along, because he also plays guitar and sings and understands, and then excuses himself to serve a chick in her twenties on the other side of the bar.

Without anyone to talk to, Frank zones out completely, thinking about a few tweaks he wants to make to one of his songs. The creak of a barstool one down from him draws him from his mind. He glances over at the stranger who just sat next to him and, mid-sip, sends him a casual nod of acknowledgement before realizing with a start that the stranger is actually one of his co-workers.

The beer halts halfway down his throat and brings on a coughing fit he barely suppresses. If Frank didn’t have the attention of his coworker before, he certainly does now, so he doesn’t have much choice but to say, “Uh, sorry.”

With his head tilted and eyebrows drawn together, the man—Frank only remembers his teacher name, Mr. Way, which feels too formal for the setting—says, “Are you okay?”

“Fucking great,” Frank says but it comes out as more of a croak. The beer burns his raw throat when he takes a swig to try and quell the itch to cough but the cool liquid sooths the urge enough.

Ray returns from the chick and approaches Mr. Way. “How’s it going, Gerard?”

“Good,” says Gerard—yes, that’s his name, Frank remembers now—accepting what’s probably a rum and Coke prepared below the counter, from Ray. “Thanks, buddy.”

Ray nods and runs a cloth over his side of the counter and Frank leans back in his chair under the guise of looking for his band mates but really he wants to steal glances at the man next to him. Gerard has a few inches and probably forty pounds on Frank and wears this green military-style jacket that Frank doesn’t remember ever seeing him without. Frank never learned what Gerard teaches, exactly, but the ink stains on his fingertips and the smudge of white paint against his green shoulder suggest art. Gerard lags behind nearly everyone else at the bar in terms of stylishness and put-togetherness but the careful part of his brown hair and the pressed lines of his pants evoke in Frank an image of Gerard standing in front of his closet and mirror at home, putting reasoned thought into how he would look on Sunday night at Belleville’s last good dive bar.

His throat still burns from coughing when Evan returns from packing their stuff into the van.

“Hey, why’s your face all red?” Evan asks, placing a hand on Frank’s shoulder and dropping his volume to say, “Wait, are you pulling right now?”

Evan jerks his head indiscreetly towards Gerard who hopefully isn’t eavesdropping as Frank feigns indignant aversion and scoffs, “Shut the fuck up.”

“Hey, good for you. It’s about time you got laid,” Evan says. “You can’t leave my sister for dick and then not get any. That’s gotta, like, I don’t know, violate the terms of the divorce.”

Next to them, Gerard swirls the ice in his rum and Coke and clears his throat.

Frank pushes Evan away. “Fucking asshole,” he mutters into his beer before downing the rest of it.

Truthfully, a year after his divorce, Frank still struggles with his attraction to men, struggles to accept that part of him as a facet of his identity instead of an occasionally mortifying and usually inconvenient mark upon his life. Can Evan tell that Frank was eyeing his co-worker with interest? Even worse, can Gerard himself?

Evan laughs, unbothered, perhaps because he knows there’s little that he could do to actually earn Frank’s wrath. “I’m gonna head out. You staying here for now?”

Frank traces the rim of the empty bottle with a light finger. When he was little, his grandfather showed him how empty bottles turned into musical instruments if you blew across the top at the right angle. He thinks about Frank Joseph Iero playing Hot Cross Buns on beer bottles and considers going home now to walk his dog, shower, and make himself something hot for dinner. Maybe he’d find some generic porno online and have time to enjoy it before getting himself off and collapsing against his pillows to sleep. But the morning comes too soon after nights spent alone at home and Monday morning means waking up before the sun and Belleville High School and the harsh fluorescent lights of the administration office.

“I’m gonna hang out for a little longer,” Frank tells Evan, who shrugs, issues a half-warning not to drink himself to death before their show next weekend, and then leaves with the rest of the band.

Frank sighs deeply and contemplates putting his head down on the counter before asking Ray for another beer. When Ray bends down to retrieve one from the cooler, Frank quickly says, “Actually, no, fuck that. Something stronger.”

Ray stands up straight. “What happened to ‘You don’t want to know my salary’? Did you get a better job while I was at the other end of the bar?”

“What’s the point of making money if I can’t spend it?” Frank says and orders an Old Fashioned, andrequests another a few minutes later. Maybe he shouldn’t drink so much on a school night, and maybe his job will suck even more than it already does in the morning, and maybe he can’t really afford to Uber home tonight _and_ to his car tomorrow before work, but the thought of ending his night now—of going home to sleep and wake up—makes him want to blow his brains out, just a little.

Around an hour after Evan’s departure, Frank finds himself in a conversation with Gerard about his recent set, which Frank, for some reason, is surprised to learn he saw.

“The last song was pretty good,” Gerard tells him when repeatedly goaded for his true thoughts on their set, and then adds shyly, “I wonder how it would sound, though, if you added another guitar to it. Like, a countermelody.”

Frank snorts into his whiskey, sufficiently buzzed and getting more boorish by the minute. “No way I’m adding someone else to the band.”

“There’s a million decent guitar players in Jersey. It wouldn’t be that hard to find someone who’s a good fit.”

“No. No way.”

“Why not?”

“Because… I don’t know.” Frank finishes his second whiskey. “Because it’s, like, my band and that’s just too many people to think about.”

Gerard shrugs as a group of kids, probably college students, noisily enter the bar and slide past them. “Think about it like this—if you had another guitarist then it would take some of the pressure off you. That could maybe, like, give you the space to think about your vocals more.”

“You think my voice needs work?” Frank can feel himself getting riled up. Sometimes he wishes he knew how to flirt outside of antagonizing his person of interest.

Gerard’s ink-stained fingertips tap the wood counter. “I didn’t say that. You don’t have to take my advice if you don’t want to. But you’re the one who wanted to know what I thought, so now you know.”

His clipped tone stings and tells Frank that they don’t, apparently, share flirting strategies. “Whatever, dude,” Frank mutters, ready to wallow in the rejection all night long if need be. “You’re just, like, an art teacher.”

“Nice to know you do recognize me, after all.” Gerard sighs and Frank feels like shit. “Ray, can I settle my tab now?”

Frank feels even more like shit when Ray approaches their side of the bar and, while handing Gerard the receipt in exchange for his credit card, says, “Hey, dude, I totally meant to tell you earlier but it slipped my mind. A couple girls were in here the other night asking when you were going to play again.”

For a second Frank thinks that the words are directed at him but deflates even further into the bar top when Gerard answers instead. “Oh, that’s nice. I’m always surprised that anyone still remembers us.”

“Dude, come on.” Ray hands the card back to Gerard, who tucks it into his wallet. “How could they forget? You with that bright red hair, Mikey with his all spiked up… like something straight out of a comic book.”

Gerard smiles softly. “That was kinda the point.”

“The music, too, man, you guys had something,” Ray continues, glancing obviously at Frank. “Sucks you never put together a demo or anything.”

The funny thing is that something in Ray’s description rings familiar and the briefest snippets of a memory resurface in his mind—a tall thin man with hair dyed the color of a fire engine who had an infectious stage presence as he bounced all over the place like he was part of the music and not just its custodian, who stirred something in Frank’s chest, something he didn’t like to feel when Jamia was next to him.

“I like what I do now,” Gerard says and Frank feels the blow, directed at him, for what it is. “Maybe one day, though. I’ll see you later, Ray. And you, Frank, maybe at the school sometime.”

Frank shrugs and waves without much enthusiasm in Gerard’s direction as he leaves.

“You’re a fucking dick sometimes,” Ray tells Frank after Gerard clears the door.

Frank pushes his glass away and retrieves his own wallet from his pocket. “Yeah, I know.”

And then he goes home anyway, because morning comes even when he tries to slow time down, and Angela Rinaldi is much easier to deal with when he isn’t fighting a hangover.

~

Angela Rinaldi is a God-fearing Roman Catholic who attends Wednesday night prayer group with Frank’s mom every week and hasn’t missed Mass more than three times in as many years, but she also lives and breathes by her daily horoscope in _The Star-Ledger_ and buys into superstitions more than anyone he knows.

She has her nose buried in the newspaper when he comes back from a smoke break on the Tuesday after his night at the bar. “Today looks good for you, Scorpio,” Angela calls to him from her desk, piled high with a mountain of paperwork and gum wrappers behind a nameplate that reads ANGELA RINALDI, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. She reads from the paper, “People today will see you for your authentic self and respect your worldview.”

“Really? Someone should tell these fucking kids, then,” Frank says, sitting as his own desk, a cramped square made of hard gray plastic shoved in a corner behind a flimsy sound panel. He isn’t important enough for a nameplate, but if he was it would say FRANK IERO, ASSISTANT SECRETARY, which is more pathetic than funny. “They tried to lock me out of the building just now. Fuckers.”

“Good for them. Serves you right for bringing that awful habit on campus.”

Angela talks about Belleville High School the same way she talks about church and her visit to the Sistine Chapel in the seventies, the same way she talks about the strip mall psychic she consults about every medium-sized decision in her life.

No high school even approaches holiness as far as Frank’s concerned, and to an extent every single one he ever attended (two separate Catholic schools, six weeks of summer school in this very hellhole) resembles the others in the same mediocre ways. Gum as old as time itself dotting the sidewalks like an inverse night sky. Lockers that won’t shut right no matter what you try. A stuffy smell that becomes especially potent in early winter mornings. Teachers who hate their jobs so much that they scour the place for kids breaking the rules and, upon discovering two boys holding hands and sharing a soft kiss in the bathroom, drag them to the principal’s office in front of everybody and call their parents.

Rolling his eyes, Frank says, “Aren’t you scared you’re gonna go to hell for reading that horoscope shit every day?”

Angela closes the newspaper with a huff, mostly unphased, while Frank scans the new stack of manila folders that appeared on his desk sometime in the last ten minutes.

“What’s all this stuff?” he asks, and Angela tells him that each folder belongs to a student with enough absences accumulated to warrant school intervention, and that for the rest of the day he must go find each student and make them sign an agreement to start showing up or come back for summer school.

He wrinkles his nose at the task. “If even one kid starts to cry, I’m quitting.”

“No one is making you stay here, Frankie,” says Angela with a stern look that means his mother will be hearing about this tomorrow evening at prayer group. Which shouldn’t concern him nearly as much as it does, with him as close to forty as he is.

His recent reliance on his mother for things like approval and connecting him to employment opportunities makes up only one of many reasons why Frank feels like he really is back in high school.

Frank grabs the stack of folders from his desk and trudges from the front office to locate a bunch of kids with the sole unifying characteristic of being hard to find.

The first few folders go smoothly. Miraculously, all students show up in the appropriates classes as noted by the schedules in their file and none appear particularly surprised to hear that they likely will be continuing school through June and July—they’d probably have to anyway just on the basis of their grades. Frank starts to wonder if Angela’s horoscope has merit after all as he enters the music building an hour before the end of the school day for Rachel Bryant, the last student on his list.

“Rachel’s not here, dear,” the music teacher, Mrs. Madura, informs Frank after she asks him to repeat himself for the third time. She’s at least ten years overdue for her retirement and wastes no time in setting her arms again and leading the band into song.

Frank is about to dismiss his task as a job done well enough when one of the clarinet players at the end of a long row touches his arm as he walks by her.

The girl’s foot taps along with the song and she quickly puts her clarinet up near her mouth like she’s playing, though she’s busy telling Frank, “If you’re looking for Rachel she’s probably in the art room.”

Her mention of Gerard’s classroom catches Frank off guard enough that he asks her, “Why the hell would she be in art?”

The girl shrugs. “She just goes there when she’s upset,” she says before putting her clarinet between her lips and starting to play, ending the conversation.

Perplexed, Frank exits the music building. Where the hell is the art room?

~

With only fifteen minutes remaining in the school day, finding Rachel barely warrants the effort of asking a random student with hazy, bloodshot eyes for directions, but once he finds the right room, he knocks anyway.

Instead of Gerard, a boy with long blue hair lets Frank into the crowded, noisy room, and he immediately understands why kids would want to hang out here instead of class.

The earthy odor of clay mixes with the chemical smell of paint and someone’s laptop plays _Walk Among Us_ in the corner. Frank knows from the schedule next to the door that Gerard should be teaching Two-Dimensional Art right now, but the amount of kids there who busily work on projects in decidedly three-dimensional mediums indicate that the room holds more than just the current scheduled class. In fact, Frank must spend a moment scanning the sea of people to locate Gerard.

Gerard, on the other hand, has already spotted Frank and is stepping over student projects and shimmying past crowded desks to get to the door.

“Hi,” Frank says, feeling like an ass in his work button-down and khakis. The front office must have a stricter dress code than that for elective teachers because Angela would have a fit if Frank showed up in anything as casual as sandals and… are those _parachute pants_? As strange as the combination of baggy trousers and his trademark green jacket looks, Gerard pulls it off and somehow looks _cool_.

Frank used to be cool like that, used to have other punk kids come up to him at shows and ask to look at the tag on his jacket so they could search for a similar one at Goodwill. When did Frank become this uncool, Banana Republic version of himself?

“Hello again,” Gerard says.

The two of them stare at each other for a long second before Frank remembers his purpose and pulls out the right folder. “Is, um, Rachel here? Rachel Bryant?” he asks.

“She’s over there.” Gerard points to a girl with clunky headphones over her ears sitting alone in a corner scribbling furiously into a sketchbook.

Frank only has a moment to be relieved before he notices her red-rimmed eyes and the way she keeps sniffling and wiping her nose with the sleeve of her sweater. “Aw, hell,” he says, forgetting that Gerard can hear him.

“She’s had kind of a bad day,” Gerard tells him.

She must not be a Scorpio. Frank looks at the forms in his hands. “Well, fuck.”

“Not good news?”

Frank’s jaw clenches. “Dude, I’m an administrative assistant. Bad news is, like, in our fucking mission statement.”

As he walks to Rachel’s spot on the floor, he sends up a prayer to whichever saint watches over public school secretaries that somehow her bad day is the kind made better by the threat of summer school.

It, predictably, is not.

“This is the form your parents have to sign,” Frank says and it’s the straw the breaks the camel’s back as Rachel descends fully into tears. Thankfully, the chaos and music shield them from the notice of her peers, though Gerard keeps his gaze settled carefully on them the whole time.

“They’re gonna _kill me_ ,” Rachel sobs. Her nose runs and the snot catches a few strands of her straight brown hair. “I can’t go to summer school!”

Frank winces and searches frantically for something to console her with. “Look, uh, Rachel. It’s not set in stone yet, you know? Like, if you stay in class you don’t have to go. And it’s not that bad, you know, summer school.”

“How do you know?”

Franks tells her that he went to summer school at Belleview back in the day, and adds, “I met my wife there, too, so it worked out pretty good.”

In some ways, for better or for worse, Frank lives in the moment he met Jamia. Every time he enters the auditorium, he passes the chair where he sat, eyes glazed over and fighting sleep, in his redo of Junior English with every other slacker in their district who needed the class to earn their diploma. Jamia, who was there to get the credit so she could graduate early, for some reason chose to sit next to him and complimented his shoes. That day he wore this ratty pair of Converses, stained gray from stepping in murky street puddles and riddled with random in-class doodles—dicks and stick figures and the graffiti S. He knew right then that they’d get along but hadn’t anticipated how much he would love her almost immediately, hadn’t thought it possible for him.

Sitting next to her in the auditorium that summer, Frank really had thought himself in love with Jamia. Now… well, he isn’t sure he knows what love feels like at all.

Rachel sniffs. “Really?”

Frank shrugs. “Yeah. I mean, don’t tell my boss I told you, but summer classes are much easier than regular classes. Honest, I barely stayed awake the whole time and was, like, one of the better students there.”

Rachel seems to calm down some, her meltdown reduced to light tears and the occasional hiccup. “What if it changed since, like, the eighties or whatever?”

“Hey, I’m not that old,” Frank says defensively. “It was the nineties.”

That draws a small smile from Rachel, who finally takes the documents and puts them in her bag, promising to show her parents tonight right as the bell for the end of the day rings. All the kids stream out of the room in one go, somehow avoiding injury in their stampede, and only a minute after the official end of the day, the art room is void of students.

“Rachel didn’t look too upset when she left,” Gerard says as Frank picks himself up from the floor.

Frank doesn’t comment on that, instead asking, “Why do you let kids skip class in here? Kids get in trouble for skipping, you know, whether or not they get caught in the act.”

Gerard shrugs and starts straightening the room, moving paints and colored pencils into their appropriate boxes, and throwing pieces of trash into the large bin in the middle of the room. “Figure that if kids are going to skip, I’d rather have them here doing art than somewhere else getting into worse stuff.”

“So, the cool parent approach,” Frank says. “You sure that translates well to teaching?”

Gerard stops dumping out a jar of paint water in the sink to send Frank an icy stare. “Whatever, man. I’m just an art teacher.”

Frank’s ears burn. “I know I deserved that,” he says, gaze fixed on the ground. “Look, about the other night… I was a dick, you know? So, I’m sorry.”

“I get it,” Gerard says.

“It’s just that, I kind of turn into, like, an asshole when I drink like that. I don’t know why.”

“I get it,” Gerard says again. He turns on the faucet and splashes the water around the sink before turning it off and walking to one of the tables with clay sculptures on it. “Here, help me move these over there. Thanks. Hey, Frank, you know where I went when I wanted to skip class in high school?”

“Where?”

“Across the street to the liquor store parking lot.”

Frank vaguely remembers a strip mall with a liquor store and pawn shop across from Belleview, a few years before he had to spend the summer here, that the city knocked down almost as soon as he became aware of its existence. “Oh. Right.”

“So, yeah, I get it,” Gerard continues. “I’ve met—and been—just about every kind of drunk person you could imagine. And that’s what I mean, by the way, about there being worse stuff for these kids to get into. When they’re feeling angry, or frustrated, or sad… I don’t know. I wish that, when I was in high school and felt like that, there was a place like this where I could put those feelings into _art_ instead of, like, drinking beer in the middle of the day and throwing the empty cans at birds for catharsis, or whatever. You know?”

Frank suddenly feels very, very ashamed to have thought himself better than Gerard for a single minute, because when will his music ever get the chance to help people like Gerard does, just by giving his kids a safe space to feel how they needed to feel? Would it have made a difference for him, back then? Would he still leave his shitty job at this shitty school every day to go home to his shitty, empty, apartment, where he sits alone on his shitty sofa wondering if, at his age, he has anything to look forward to before he dies, or if he should just speed up the process?

In that moment he’s like the Grinch at the end of the story, when his heart triples in size, just filled to the brim with tenderness for the man, all washed out and optimistic, in front of him. “I know what you mean,” Frank says.

~

Gerard’s choice to pursue a friendship with him comes as a surprise to Frank. The week following their run-in at the bar, he nearly jumps out of his skin when Gerard knocks on the door of Angela’s office to ask Frank if he’d like to join him in the art room for lunch.

“The PTA dropped off some food,” Gerard says, tucking his hands into his pant pockets. “There’s a lot, so.”

A moment passes before Frank recognizes the invitation. “Oh,” he says, considering the wilted salad on his desk. “Yeah, cool.” 

So Frank follows Gerard back to the art room, where he finds a few other faculty members standing around a table covered in a spread of food in foils pans. In the center of the table sits a half-eaten chocolate sheet cake, the remnants of a message written in loopy icing— IRTHDAY R WAY—adorning the face. 

“It’s your birthday,” Frank realizes. 

Gerard gives him a bashful smile. “Well, yeah,” he says, and leaves it at that, pointing out the different foods and, once informed, backtracking to note which options accommodate Frank’s dietary restrictions.

Frank grabs a plate and serves himself some of the plain pasta and red sauce, expecting to eat alone and return to his desk, but Gerard surprises him again by joining him, as though he can smell the loneliness wafting off Frank. It’s been two, three months since Frank shared a lunch with anyone besides Angela or his mom, and he welcomes the fresh conversation from a person who, turns out, shares a lot of interests with him. Because Frank was half drunk and a whole dick during their first real encounter, he completely missed the quiet intelligence and sharp wit that Gerard brings to every interaction.

Frank tries really, really hard to tone down his bullshit and put a good foot forward, because, while he doesn’t exactly understand why Gerard would want any sort of companionship from him, he doesn’t want to overanalyze the first good thing that’s happened to him in months and risk losing it by sheer self-destruction. His eyes will stay far away from the mouth of this gift horse, thank you very much.

(He does, however, in a moment of weakness ask Gerard why he keeps Frank around. Gerard thinks about it a moment and then says, “I don’t know. You’re funny and honest, I guess. And it’s good to be around someone who cares about creating as much as I do. Does that answer your question?” It does, and Frank blinks and stares at Gerard for a moment before dropping the conversation.)

Eating lunch with Gerard and having him there at his band’s sets becomes routine for Frank. Suddenly the twin urges to drink all night and smoke during the day when he can’t drink diminish, especially when he and Gerard start spending time together outside of school. Gerard doesn’t drink or smoke—his rum and Coke that first night at the bar had, in fact, just been Diet Coke—and when they hang out Frank sometimes forgets the temptation ever existed. He even makes an appointment with his old psychiatrist to go back on antidepressants.

So, yeah, Gerard’s friendship is good for Frank. It makes him feel healthier than he has since before the divorce, before the onset of doubt that he could make his marriage work sprouted in his head. It’s youth, it’s repose, it’s contentment. Frank ignores the heat burgeoning in his chest, pretends it’s the affectionate warmth of novel camaraderie instead of hot-to-the-touch fire.

Spring blossoms in all its fullness in late April, bringing weather that opens every window and door at Belleville High.

They take lunch outside on the picnic table right outside Gerard’s classroom and sometimes students join them there, too. Frank learns their nicknames and their favorite classes and their _when-I-grow-up_ s. No longer does he regard the kids at his job as faceless last names in his computer who live to complicate his life with their trivial problems. They’re people, individuals just trying their best, and he doesn’t know why he took so long to realize that. Makes him think that he probably would’ve been a shitty dad if Jamia hadn’t lost the baby two weeks after their wedding.

One day in May he brings his acoustic guitar to the rickety wooden table where he, Gerard, and the kids eat lunch. Rachel and her friend Amira, the clarinet player, request several songs before they ask for one that Frank knows well enough to play the chords to.

“Guys, I told you, I don’t know any Paramore,” Frank tells them.

Rachel crosses her arms. “Yes, you do! There’s no way you don’t.”

“I don’t,” he insists. He catches Gerard’s eye and the two of them share a knowing look.

“Come on, ‘Misery Business’? I was three in 2007 and I know who they are,” says Rachel while Amira dissolves into giggles next to her. “Geez, Mister Iero, did you forgot to listen to music that whole time?”

Frank tells her, “Actually, I spent _that whole time_ owning a record shop.”

Amira perks up. “Wait, really? Was it around here?”

“Ah, yeah,” Frank says, running his thumb over the empty spot on his left-hand ring finger. “I used to own it with my ex-wife. It’s been closed for a while though.”

“Your ex-wife?” Rachel says. “Summer school girl?”

“Summer school girl.”

“You got divorced?”

Rachel’s a sweet kid but she struggles with personal boundaries sometimes. Frank nods. “Yeah, but she’s still great. Really great.”

“Maybe you can think of something else for Mister Iero to play,” suggests Gerard before Rachel or Amira can say anything else.

Frank nods thankfully at him, and then asks them what they want to hear.

Amira asks, “Do you know any Fall Out Boy?”

Frank does.

A few songs later, the bell that signals the end of student lunch period rings and the girls leave for their next class. Gerard and Frank still have a little time to kill, though, before they have to return to work so Frank spends the time showing Gerard part of one of his new songs. Gerard offers his advice, which, now that Frank isn’t piss-drunk, he takes under consideration.

“So you mean like this?” asks Frank as he tries to play through one of Gerard’s suggestions.

Gerard shakes his head. “No. More like…” He pauses and puts his hands out. “Here, can I see?”

“Sure.”

Frank hands him the guitar and Gerard plays the progression, adding a seventh to a minor chord and a small moment of finger picking. “Like that, kinda.”

After taking the guitar back, Frank plays through it like Gerard. “Whoa,” he says, donning the kind of smile that only comes with creative success, and then hands the instrument to Gerard once more. “That’s tight as hell, man. I didn’t know you played guitar.”

Gerard shrugs and absentmindedly picks the strings. “I kinda suck at it.”

“Not really,” Frank says.

“Yes, really,” says Gerard. “Hey, I didn’t know you owed a record store.”

“Oh, yeah. That place.” Frank rubs his neck and sighs. “Skeleton Crew, it was called. That place was my baby. Loved it like it was my fucking kid.”

“What happened?”

A gust of wind blows past them, lifting a leaf from the ground to collide with the guitar. The softest of sounds comes from the contact.

Without the guitar his lap, Frank doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “It’s rough owning your own business, you know? Especially today with a place like a record store. We barely broke even before the divorce, and then right after we settled with the lawyers, my grandpa got sick and we had to help out a lot with the hospital bills and the funeral costs and stuff, so.” He shrugs. In the distance a guy walks his dog and scratches his balls, oblivious to Frank’s observation. “It was weird running a store with my ex-wife, anyway. Maybe it’s for the best.”

“But you’re still friendly with her?”

Frank looks up. “Huh?”

“With your ex-wife. You told Rachel that your ex-wife was great, so I was wondering if you two were, like, still on good terms.”

“I guess. I mean, we don’t really talk much these days since the store closed last year,” Frank says and then gets just inordinately sad, thinking of Jamia and her easy smile and the way that she helped shoulder all of his burdens without him needing to even ask. “We don’t really hold anything against each other, though.”

“Do you miss being married to her?”

Frank thinks for barely a second and then nods. “Yeah, she was the best. We were rock solid in terms of, like, making each other laugh and always being on the same page, you know, emotionally and shit.” He laughs once and then nervously adds, “Too bad I had to be gay in the end.”

Frank catches the surprise on Gerard’s face, the sudden blinking and head tilt. “You’re gay?” Gerard asks.

“That’s what they tell me,” Frank jokes feebly, his ears burning, unsure why he’s being so shy about it all of a sudden. Actually, he does know why—because Gerard likes men, too, and in his vulnerability Frank has opened up a whole new world of possible rejection.

Gerard strums the guitar once and then silences the strings with his palm. “Jesus, and last week I told you my whole coming out teen drama sob story and everything like it was something you couldn’t relate to.”

Gerard had. The details included a tear-soaked confession to his grandmother where his whole family promised to love him, several well-intentioned but misguided visits to women’s clothing stores, and the subsequent and remarkably casual coming out of Gerard’s younger brother, Mikey.

(“He just blurted out in the middle of dinner, ‘You know I’m bi, right?’ to the whole family,” Gerard had told Frank. “Didn’t even bother to put down the mashed potatoes first. He’s the weirdest fucking guy I know.”)

“I mean, mine definitely looked different than yours,” Frank says. “I was like thirty-five, for one, and everyone around me cared a lot more that I was getting divorced in the first place than the reasons why it was happening.”

“Coming out sucks no matter what it looks like,” Gerard says and Frank has to agree with him there.

The thing about Gerard is that he’s _out_ out. Out like he doesn’t care who knows about his sexuality and rarely bothers anymore to tell people formally, just sprinkles in phrases like “my ex-boyfriend” and “one time when I was at this gay bar” or wears buttons of the gay and nonbinary pride flags and continues on like it meant nothing. His nonchalance looks like freedom to Frank, who keeps a mental list of every person who knows about his queerness and carefully edits everything he says to keep up the appearance of heterosexuality.

“I know what you mean,” says Frank as Gerard plays a particularly sweet combination of progressions. “Hey, what was that?”

“What, this?” Gerard repeats it but then stops. “Oh, whatever, just something I was working on.”

“Play it again. Show me.”

After more goading, Gerard does, even throwing a few rough words in. It’s syncopated and funky and his voice is as special and intense as Frank remembers from a few years ago.

“Dude, you so don’t suck at the guitar,” Frank tells him earnestly. “You have to perform at the bar again. Like, you _have_ to.”

But Gerard dismisses it outright. “No, no way,” he says, putting the guitar down in between them on the table. “As you like to remind me, I’m just an art teacher, not a musician. My performing days are behind me.”

Frank shakes his head incredulously and reaches out to grab Gerard’s hand. “What? Don’t listen to me, I’m a tool and I’ll only lead you astray, except now when I’m totally right. Teaching art is what you do, not who you _are_ , idiot. You don’t have to, like, be boxed in, you know what I mean?”

Gerard smiles, shaking his head, and Frank is suddenly aware of two things: first, that it won’t take too much more convincing to get Gerard back up on stage, and second, he’s holding Gerard’s hand and neither are letting go.

“I’ll think about it,” Gerard says, and then Frank’s watch ruins everything by beeping and telling them that lunch has ended, and he must return to boring, mindless work. 

~

Frank beams as he hops up onto one of the barstools in front of Ray, watching Gerard and Mikey set up their equipment on the stage.

“Nice to see you so happy,” Ray says as he cleans a shot glass. “You two going steady yet?”

“No, damn bastard gave his class ring to some other girl,” Frank says, rolling his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Ray, what do you think this is, _Grease_?”

“There's the jackass I know and love.”

Frank shrugs and his grin widens. “Shut up, he's about to start.”

Gerard walks up to the mic and, after a short introduction of himself and Mikey on bass, starts to sing. The small crowd instantly becomes engrossed in the music, clapping wildly every time a song ends. While Gerard takes a water break, Ray leans over the bar and asks Frank, "Why aren't you up there, playing with him?"

"Come on, Ray, have some common sense. If I'm playing with him on stage how am I supposed to see the set from down here?"

Ray nods deeply as though this makes perfect sense. "Ah, yes. How stupid of me. Forget I asked."

But Ray raises a solid point. Gerard did ask Frank if he wanted to play guitar in his band, but Frank had turned him down.

"Maybe in the future," was his initial answer to Gerard. "I want to see you live again, though, from the audience. After the first set we can talk."

Sometimes as he lies in bed at night, waiting to fall asleep, Frank imagines them in a band together, but knows that as great a musician as he turned out to be, Gerard’s heart belongs in that classroom and to ask him to devote any less time there would be a disservice to himself and those kids.

After their successful set, Gerard and Mikey claim a booth and Frank joins them there for a celebratory round of alcohol-free beverages.

After Ray and Gerard both ask Ray for Diet Coke, the bartender turns to Frank and asks him if he's getting something real tonight.

"Sure," Frank says. "Rum and Coke—hey, could you make that a virgin?"

Ray rolls his eyes and tells them in good humor that Frank isn’t funny at all and they'd better have their IDs ready when he comes back with their drinks.

Frank just doesn't feel like drinking. It's nice.

About thirty minutes after Gerard and Mikey's performance, a girl approaches their booth and shyly tells Gerard how much she liked his music. He shakes her hand earnestly and enthusiastically and the two of them quickly become engaged in conversation. Gerard told him once that he was drawn to Frank's passion but, really, it's Gerard who puts every ounce of himself into everything he does. From the way Gerard talks to the girl, asking her about herself and the kinds of music she likes and diligently listening, you'd think they were intimate friends rather than acquaintances of two minutes.

Gerard's conversation leaves Frank functionally alone with Mikey, who he's barely met but has heard much about. The feeling is evidently mutual, as Mikey tells Frank, "You know, I think you're good for my brother."

"Good for him?" Frank raises an eyebrow. "I'm lucky he lets me be around him."

Mikey shrugs. "He just seems more relaxed these days, that's all. Like, I didn't think I'd ever see him get back on stage."

"He didn't need me to do that," Frank says, but he sees the truth in what Mikey's saying.

"Maybe not." Mikey sips his drink. "Gerard, he kinda, like, gets stuck sometimes, you know? You helped get him out of his comfort zone or whatever."

"Thanks, I guess."

And then Mikey sets off a proverbial bomb when he says, "Yeah. I think that’s why, you know, he loves you so much."

Frank is so completely taken aback that he stutters for at least ten seconds before he can say, "Gerard and I—we aren't together."

"You aren't?" Mikey looks genuinely confused. A few feet away, Gerard still talks to the girl, oblivious. "He always talked like you—Never mind. Sorry, I guess."

"Does he...really feel that way about me?"

The words leave his mouth before he realizes that he's saying them. His head swims.

Mikey inspects him with mild curiosity. "I don't know,” he says in a tone indicating that yes, he does know, but he’s not about to incriminate himself. “Do you?"

Frank looks down in response. "Don't tell him."

Gerard rejoins them a minute later but Frank leaves soon after. Gerard frowns when Frank goes, which brings more than a touch of guilt to his chest but he's just too damn distracted to be there.

~

At home, Frank walks his dog and then turns on the most mind-numbing reality TV that he can find. Then once that doesn't work, he finds a porno and gets himself off but it's barely enjoyable because his mind is somewhere else—on _someone_ else—the whole time. The remnant high of his orgasm wears off leave him alone in his bed with just the spunk on his hand and himself for company.

The thought that nothing good has ever really come of him being gay slithers into his mind and hangs there by its teeth—a sentiment he avoids during daylight hours. The lonely darkness of his bedroom brings him back to those months two years ago, the lonely period of self-discovery, the look on Jamia's face when he reached his boiling point and finally told her, the most painful parts of their divorce followed by his grandfather's death and then, the last straw, losing the store. All those years, his entire youth, that he spent trying to build something stable for himself—and then trying to be happy with it—fizzled out and left him with an empty apartment, a job he hated, and the three friends who could stand him when he was mean and drunk.

And then came Gerard, filling his life with meaning and purpose again, at least for a few minutes each day, and Frank just doesn't know what to do. Sixteen-year-old Frank, before that teacher caught him in the bathroom with another boy and he had to change schools, would have marched right up to Gerard and told him everything but Frank isn't sixteen anymore and Gerard isn't one of the doe-eyed lean boys that that sixteen year-old used to dote on. Gerard is softness, and comfort, and kindness, and color, and Frank can't lose that. He doesn't want to be alone again.

After almost an hour of tossing and turning, twisting and kicking the sheets around, Frank grabs his phone from his nightstand and calls the first person who comes to mind.

“Frank?” Jamia’s voice sounds clear over the phone even though he can tell she’s fighting back a yawn. They haven’t spoken in almost four months and to hear her feels like the first sip of coffee the morning after a long night. “Is that you? Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Frank says. “I just… wanted to hear your voice.”

“Honey, it’s so late. Did you have something you wanted to tell me?”

Frank picks at a scab on his leg. “Yeah. There’s this… I was thinking, maybe, of going back to school, you know, finishing my degree.”

“That’s great. But why did you have to tell me this now?” She pauses and then her voice takes on a tone of urgency. “Are you really doing okay? I don’t need to, like, call anyone, do I?”

Maybe he should hang up the phone now, considering the slim chance of him actually saying what he intended to after chickening out once. But Frank isn’t ready to hang up yet. When will he gather the courage to call Jamia next? Four months from now?

“No, no, I’m okay,” Frank promises. He sighs deeply and confesses, “I didn’t really call to tell you about the school thing. I mean, that’s true, but. You know. There’s something else.”

“I figured there was.”

“Really?”

“We were married for fifteen years, honey. I think I know a thing or two about you.”

“Right,” he says, and tells her everything about his feelings for Gerard.

After he finishes talking, Jamia stays silent for a while.

“Shit, was that weird to tell you?” Frank asks, wishing his foot would leave his mouth for a single minute of his life.

“No, Frank, it’s okay,” she says. “I’m glad you called, really. You know I just want you to be happy. So…” Jamia sighs. “I think you should tell him how you feel. And if it goes south you can call me again and we’ll talk about it then, too.”

“Okay,” Frank says. Then, without thinking too much about it, he adds, “I still love you, you know.”

“And even though you’re gay you’re still the best lay I ever had.” Jamia laughs softly. “Hey, why don’t we meet for lunch next week and you can tell me all about Gerard and going back to school and stuff then?”

“That would be good, I think.”

“Okay, good.” Jamia yawns loudly. “I’m going back to bed now, alright?”

Frank tells her alright, and that he’s going to sleep too. His body listens for once and within twenty minutes he’s out.

~

Funny how courage comes to you in the middle of the night, invigorates and moves you almost to the point of grabbing your keys and _fuck it, I’m going over there now and he’s going to hear me out,_ only for such fortitude to completely evaporate by morning. With his alarm beeping loudly on his side table, his dog whining from the living room to go outside, and sleep crusting his eyelids shut, the world appears totally devoid of possibility.

Frank pulls the blanket back over his head and wills Belleville High School to blow up or disappear or do whatever it takes to preclude him from going in and facing the music. Somehow, he rounds up the willpower to crawl out of bed, walk his dog, and pull himself together for work.

Shortly after he arrives, Angela struts into their office, tense and holding a stack of manilla folders about three feet high.

Flustered and shrill, she declares, “Harry and Jeannette _really_ dropped the ball on this one,” which is about as hateful an insult as she ever doles out. When she drops the files on her desk they land with an audible thud atop all the other shit she has there. “Get ready to work through lunch. Mercy me, get ready to work through _dinner_.”

His immediate relief to have both a distraction and a reason not to join Gerard for lunch mixes with a growing panic that the more time passes, the cloudier his feelings will become.

He and Angela work to straighten and reorganize the student files, which concern summer school registration, it turns out. Harry and Jeannette, the assistants of Belleville’s two vice principals, earned Angela’s ire in their neglect to distribute about three forms per student related to their enrollment in specific summer courses. This means that Frank and Angela must sort through every folder, determining which files lack which forms because, of course, each student is missing different ones. By late afternoon on Monday, they’ve just barely managed to compile a list of what each file needs rectified because _Jesus,_ going to summer school now requires a lot more paperwork than when Frank went as a kid.

Frank and Angela work through lunch again the next day, eating handfuls of chips and trail mix in between student meetings. Angela at one point asks him if he’d like to take his lunch break but he refuses. Frank considers offering Gerard an explanation of his absence but wants to have total control over timing.

During fifth period, the school receptionist calls to tell Angela and Frank that their next appointment has arrived. Frank goes out to meet them and, even though he knew she would show up eventually, is surprised to see Rachel standing there, headphones around her neck and backpack hanging off a shoulder.

“Hi, Mr. Iero,” she says awkwardly. Rachel looks a little worse for wear, bags under her eyes and hair in a haphazard bun on top of her head. During a quiet moment last week, she mentioned that her parents’ impending separation had recently become heated—he wonders if they’re still keeping her up late at night fighting. “They said I needed to sign some stuff?”

“Yeah, kiddo. Follow me.”

As Frank leads Rachel behind the front desk and down the hallway to his office, Rachel says, “I kinda thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth or something, Mr. Iero.”

His head tilts as he looks back at Rachel. “What, because I wasn’t in lunch today?”

Rachel nods. “Yesterday, too.”

As they reach his office, Frank quirks an eyebrow and asks her if she skipped class to eat lunch with Mr. Way, because he knows her schedule well enough by now to remember that on Mondays she has class through Gerard’s lunch break.

Rachel ducks her head and says, “Only because Mr. Way looked kinda lonely. And I’m already going to summer school, aren’t I?”

Frank pictures Gerard sitting alone in his lunch room waiting for Frank or an explanation to come and wonders why, if he was so missed, Gerard didn’t call or text or even _email_ him about where he was.

“Yes, you are,” Frank says, pointing her towards an extra seat sitting in the meager space between the two desks. “Angela, this is Rachel Bryant.”

Angela and Frank finish helping Rachel complete her summer school registration right as the bell for the end of fifth period rings. Sixth period marks Gerard’s planning period so, under the guise of a smoke break, Frank visits the art room.

Walking in through the open door, he finds the classroom empty except for Gerard, hunched over a sketch in the corner with Queen playing quietly over the speakers.

Gerard looks up once Frank clears his throat. “Oh, hi, Frank,” says Gerard, tapping his computer to stop the music. “I didn’t think you’d come around today.”

Frank stays frozen in place, his hands clenched together behind his back. “Yeah, um. It’s been busy up front, with school ending soon. You know.”

“So what brings you here?” Gerard gives him a smile and Frank regrets all the minutes that could have been spent in the presence of that smile, lost for his cowardice. “Just on your break, or…”

“Not really, no.” Frank grapples with how to start something like this. Struggles to not turn around and walk back to the office or head straight behind the gym to smoke a million cigarettes. “I’m… thinking about skipping class? And thought some art could… dissuade me?”

Gerard blinks. “Oh. Okay then. Paper and colored pencils are on the tables, if you want.”

“Cool. Thanks,” Frank says, feeling like an idiot as he pulls back one of the student’s stools to sit and grabbing a piece of paper.

After a few minutes of silence wherein neither makes a move to speak to the other, Gerard starts the music again. Frank starts to draw, even though he kinda sucks, his back to Gerard and his neck burning under confused eyes. The picture barely resembles his intended subject, the Gerard he saw at the bar years ago, all red hair, flashy clothes, fast tempos, and meaty guitar rifts but he thinks he captures the likeness well enough.

Eventually, when the silence rings so loud in his head that he can’t stand it anymore, Frank tells Gerard what he told Jamia two nights earlier: “Hey, so. I’m thinking of going back to school, and I wanted to tell you.”

“What, you mean getting your degree?”

Frank turns around on the stool to face Gerard. “Yeah. I went for Music, did I tell you that? Only had a semester left.”

The day after Jamia came to him, crying, the test trembling in her cold little hands, had him at the university enrollment office filling out the paperwork for a leave of absence that eventually turned into an official withdrawal from the school.

“I think that’s great, Frankie,” Gerard says. “What do you think you’ll do afterwards?”

Frank shrugs. “I figure, you know. Mrs. Madura has to retire sometime soon. So, work here maybe.”

Gerard’s smile widens. “So you’ve warmed up to the teaching profession, then?”

Frank thinks about Rachel, about the gentle manner with which Gerard treats his students, about all the other faculty and staff who, sure, complain about their jobs but come back every day, looking to make a hard four years a little bit less painful for their students.

“A little bit, yeah,” Frank says. “If I work here, you know, as faculty, I’ll take all my lunches here.”

“That’s good.” Gerard runs a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t see you in here again.”

Frank frowns. “Come on, two days? Dude, you gotta know you mean more to me than that.” His face burns and he hates himself when he continues, “I mean, I was just really busy, you know?”

When did he turn into a coward?

“I get it.” Gerard shrugs.

“Actually, no,” Frank says. He breathes in and out and, for the first time in a while, tries to feel sixteen again, tries to tap into that reckless, noble bravery. “I wasn’t that busy. I mean, we were. But I just—I needed a few days.”

“Oh, wow, Jesus,” says Gerard, his face so even it must be deliberate. “Okay, then.”

“Shit, no, that’s not what I meant,” Frank says, scrubbing his face with his hands. “Fuck, I don’t know how to do this anymore. I was scared, Gee, okay? The other night, at the bar and after, I kinda, like… made up my mind about—”

Frank pauses and looks up to see Gerard, intent with his mouth parted. “What are you talking about?”

Pulling his stool over to Gerard, Frank takes a deep breath and decides that next week, when Jamia meets him for lunch, he wants to bring with him some sort of news, one way or another. “I haven’t felt like—seriously felt like this for a guy since I was young, alright, and it didn’t really work out for me back then. Like, it really didn’t work out. Had-to-change-schools didn’t work out.”

“So how _do_ you feel?” Gerard asks.

Frank laughs once. “It’s not obvious from, like, my stuttering and choking and shit?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if it was.”

And, well, that makes sense. Frank experimentally takes Gerard’s hand in his own and, when Gerard doesn’t drop it, says, “I like you. Really, really like you. Like, I wanna hold your hand in the hallway and get in trouble for kissing in the teacher’s lounge and shit. And maybe, I was thinking, you also liked me like that too?”

He chances a glance at Gerard’s face and sees him biting his lip in the expression of some undefined emotion. Then the sides of his mouth tug upward and Frank realizes that he’s being laughed at. In the middle of his confession, no less.

He covers his face in embarrassment. “I know, he wails in shame, I know I sound like a fucking fifteen-year-old right now. Cut me some slack, alright? I haven’t had to do this in, like twenty years.”

Gerard keeps the grin on his face. “Yeah, okay.”

“Yeah, okay, what?”

Gerard shakes his head. “Yeah, I like you _like that_ too. I got my band back together for you. Of course I do.”

Frank barely knows how to react because he never seriously imagined he’d get this far.

He wonders if Gerard has plans next Saturday afternoon to meet his ex-wife at a café as he stands up from the rickety metal stool. Then he says, “Okay, good. I’m going to…kiss you now,” and, without waiting, leans down to kiss Gerard, who’s still sitting in his chair. Gerard stands up too, and then Frank has to rise onto the balls of his feet to keep their mouths connected.

They kiss, and they kiss, and they kiss, and then they talk and laugh and Gerard tells Frank that, yes, he is free next Saturday.

Frank walks away from the art room smiling when the bell finally separates them, sending him back to the front office. Angela scolds his absence once Frank returns to the front office, but he takes the admonishment with the graceful ease of knowing that the art room, and Gerard inside it, will be there for him today, tomorrow, the next day, and all the days after that.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr @antspaul (main) or @girlfriend-frank for my mcr sideblog :) feel free to leave a comment and kudos! it truly means the world to me to see your feedback.


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